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Reviews
New Medical Challenges During the Scottish Enlightenment
Review: NEW MEDICAL CHALLENGES DURING THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT
“Upon final assessment, New Medical Challenges is a real gem. It is an outstanding piece of scholarship that will need to be read by anyone seeking to research what Edinburgh’s professors were actually teaching their students—especially since so many of the university’s graduates went on to practice and teach medicine in Britain, Europe, America, Africa and India.”
M. D. Eddy, Medical History 51 (2007): 1-2
“Guenter Risse is interested in the social construction of diseases in this period. Diseases given most attention here –malaria. “mill reek” or lead poisoning, consumption, “female complaints,” hysteria and hypochondriasis—are looked at from the perspectives of sex, pathology and medical theory, technology, class and social circumstances, environmental and ecological factors and the contexts in which they were treated…By giving the classical background to may of the topics with which it deals, the study shows the enduring continuities in medical thinking that persisted under new names. That is not news but here it is deftly done.”
Roger I. Emerson, Isis 97 (2006): 753-4
“Guenter Risse has done a fine job of integrating a wealth of primary sources from the late eighteenth century Edinburgh medical institutions and individuals into this essay collection. Much of the book focuses on the medical elite, student medical controversies and the evolution of disease identification. While the collected essays or “particular windows into the medical past” have much overlap in term of time, place and key players, they retain the impression of stand-alone topics.”
Jacqueline Jenkinson, Social History of Medicine 20 (2007): 171-2.
“New Medical Challenges During the Scottish Enlightenment brings together nine papers that deal primarily, although not exclusively, with medicine in eighteenth-century Edinburgh and that display the analytical preoccupations that have framed his work since the 1970s…The collective portrait he draws of patients and practitioners in the Athens of the North is thus meticulously observed and firmly grounded in archival materials. Furthermore, the analytical tools he employs to create this picture of medicine in eighteenth-century Edinburgh are, on the whole, highly sophisticated and employed with sensitivity and insight.”
Paul Wood, Journal of the History of Medicine 62 (2007): 538-40.
“The book is both a ‘medical history from below’ and a medical history attentive to civic and institutional context, to geographic factors, and to the complex connections between medical matters and the social ones such as diet, health, bodily comportment, and (albeit differently for men and women) moderation and modesty. It is an important contribution to the social history of Scottish Enlightenment medicine, for here we can trace the debates within medical institutions, read the notes of anxious bedside physicians, follow disputes in diagnoses, and understand how matters of livelihood and rank, then as now, limited access to health care.”
Charles W.J. Withers, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 81 (2007):867-68
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